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Cute Is What We Aim For represent quite possibily one the worst imports from across the Atlantic in human history, the perkily disfunctional emo band. Spawning a whole generation of moaning eyeliner wearing, angular fringed, spiky backpack wearing miscreants. The album has an impossibly long title, and is label stable mates with emo stalwarts Fall Out Boy and The Academy Is…. , not a great start. With songs built for The O.C. like ‘ Newport Living’ and recent single ‘There’s A Class For This’ exuberant doesn’t quite cover it.
Add to that songs about High School tribulations and illicit snogging like ‘Sweat The Battle Before The Battle Sweats You’, with ‘The Fourth Drink Instinct’ providing a darker edge with one night stands and "buying happiness by the bottle". ‘I Put The Metro In Metropolitan’ is mildly less annoying, with its chirpy Busted melodies, but something is lacking. They are missing the arrogant defiance of My Chemical Romance and the relentlessly catchy choruses of Panic! At The Disco.
‘Lyrical Lies’ is gently inoffensive, as ‘Moan’ shuffles miserably on its way, it begs the question is this really the best music has to offer the disaffected youth? While Punk represented a revolutionary movement, a fight back against all the politicking bureaucracy of the era, Emo has the clothes, the mood swings, the fondness for piercing and tattoos, but its just a bit too…whiney.
Its Punks snotty younger cousin, dressing up in its clothes and adopting it attitudes, but without its aggression it has no real purpose. That’s not to say that the younger generation doesn’t need a voice, but why not the clever sneering brilliance of Lily Allen, the genius inventiveness of a Radiohead or the relentless chirpiness of The Kooks. Just anything, anything but Emo.
